As if I didn’t already have plenty of reasons to hate Microsoft, I’ve spent the last 3 hours trying to fix the folder permissions to allow me to save what I’m working on, namely the previously mentioned Great Seal. I really expected to be done with that thing by now but I can’t save my changes to my shared folder because Windows 7 has decided that it’s read only.
I should explain this set up. Close to 10 years ago, I had enough of windows. I was tired of spending so much time so often tinkering with the operating system to get it to work right. Viruses, malware, bloatware, whatever. On xp, the registry setting that controls internet speed is set so low that unless you change it you can’t get high speed internet no matter what your service provider is offering.
Anyways, I switched to Linux. Originally I used a distribution called Mepis, then tried a few others and ended up with Kubuntu. For a while I would install every update that came along, and they came along every 6 months, but over the last few years I’ve only been installing the Long Term Support versions. Currently I’m running 12.04 Precise Pangolin. It works very well right out of the box. Unfortunately, since upgrading, I’ve found that Aspire is no longer useable under WINE. It runs, but the 3d view is garbled. It’s probably something that could be corrected if I dig in it but I’m not really interested in digging in it any more. So I use Virtualbox, a virtual machine running Windows 7. Aspire runs just fine in the virtual machine along with my wacom tablet complete with pressure sensitivity. I’ve got 6 cores of my processor assigned to it and more memory than it can use so I don’t even take a performance hit.
Now I only use the windows virtual machine for things I just can’t do in Kubuntu, mostly Aspire and Bluevoda. Everything else uses Linux native applications. This includes my file handling for the website. Everything I upload to the distribution system for sale is zipped, sometimes nested zips, and it’s all done in Linux. I’ve got 2 ways I can do this: a shared folder which the virtual windows sees as a network drive and Dropbox. Both work, but these big files I work with can take upwards of 10 minutes to upload to dropbox, so I generally work from the networked drive.
Enter the newest (to me) windows feature: At random it will decide to make your folders read only. And it randomly decided to do it to my shared folder last night. After much googling I found multiple things to try, none of which worked, but I also found that Microsofts response to this problem was to explain that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature and they’re not going to fix it. So tomorrow instead of doing something productive with my Sunday afternoon like watching football I’ll be creating a new virtual machine, installing a fresh windows 7, installing aspire and bluevoda and all the updates that entails. And once I have that done I’ll happily continue working with it until it does it again, then I’ll start over again.
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